Previews

Wheelman

Rampage is pretty simple stuff. Milo commandeers a vehicle and drives it through benches, poles, trees, tables and anything else that's small and destructible. Every smash adds to an onscreen multiplier to increase Milo's cash payout. The multiplier resets after a minute, though, so it's a strong incentive to smash as much stuff as possible. Like in the Burnout games, you'll get bonuses for causing one object to damage another. In our case, we piled on a massive multiplier over thirty seconds, then slammed some cars on the road. By the time we'd hit the minute counter, our multiplier neared 100. It's pretty fun and mindless stuff, no doubt.

We did however catch a technical issue that we missed in the rush of our last demo. For some reason, there's no auto-adjust for the camera. Although it can be argued that clicking the right stick to default the camera to a behind-the-car view is merely the player's conditioning from playing lots of GTA, the fact that the player currently has to wait for the camera to revert behind the car (or switch to rear-view first) is decidedly unwieldy. Also, while not a technical gaffe, hopefully the final product will have more than two pedestrian voices. Hearing a Spanish woman scream "ay dios mio!" every time we hit a curb got old quickly.

Hopefully there's enough time to resolve this before Wheelman hits store shelves later this year. Other than that, it looks like Midway Newcastle is fairly on track with turning Barcelona's streets into the biggest litany of setpieces and chases on this side of "Ronin" and "Bullitt."